Justinian

Between my father's first attack of stone and his second, I grew taller by the breadth of a couple of fingers, nor did my growth slow after that: I was entering my thirteenth year, and making the passage from boy to man. My shoulders thickened (though I have always been slim), my muscles hardened, I began to have more than down on my cheeks and around my private parts, and my voice, absurdly, was a boyish treble one moment and the next the deep note I have struck every since.

In the course of those few months, the world became a different place. My brother Herakleios was suddenly not just smaller than I but on the the far side of what seemed an unbridgeable chasm. My father and I, by contrast, constantly butted heads, as if we were an old ram and a young charging at each other in springtime. If he said it, I was certain it was wrong, for it came from his lips. And what I was certain of, I said- in no uncertain terms. He did not take kindly to that, something I understand better now than I did at the time.

And, like a young ram, I began to take notice of the ewes. I had known for some time what passes between man and woman, but when I was a boy it struck me as so absurd and unlikely that I could not take the notion seriously, though both my father and Myakes assured me it was true. Why on earth would any man want to do that, and why would any woman let him if he did?

Then one day, in a hallway in the palace, I walked past a serving girl who was carrying some freshly washed bed linen out to dry in the sun. Being still wet, the bedclothes had also wet her tunic, which clung to and revealed the shape of her breasts and nipples. I gaped at them, and my body stirred in a way I had not known before.

I stopped and stared after her. I had, of course, seen how women walk before that day, but I had never seen it till then. Perhaps noticing that my footsteps no longer sounded in the passage, the serving girl looked back over her shoulder. When she saw how I was looking at her, she smiled saucily, then turned a corner and disappeared.

That night (or was it the night after?- so many years have gone by, I confess I am not certain) I had a dream unlike any I had ever dreamt. Not surprisingly, the serving girl was in it. Somehow she was dry and wet, in her tunic and bare, all at the same time. I moved toward her\a160… and then I was awake, alone, in my bed in the darkness.

My nightshirt and the bedding were wet. I thought for a moment I had pissed myself in the night like a baby, but quickly realized it was not urine that had spurted from me. My body still glowed with the remembered sweetness. Wishing I could remember the dream of the serving girl in more detail, I rolled over and went back to sleep.